Light of the Word Today
Part One of Three: A Place That Is Real
Key Scripture: John 14:2–3 "In My Father's house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself; that where I am, there you may be also."
Most of us spend enormous energy making sure we do not miss things that matter. We set alarms. We book seats in advance. We plan years ahead for a holiday or a retirement. And yet the one destination that surpasses all others, the one place that will make everything else in this life look like a shadow, is the place we think about the least.
Heaven is real. It is not a symbol. It is not a comforting idea invented to help people cope with grief. Jesus, who came from Heaven and returned to it, spoke about it with the calm, settled authority of someone describing a place He knew personally. He told His frightened disciples the night before His crucifixion that He was going ahead of them to prepare a place, and that He would come back to bring them there Himself. These are not the words of a poet. These are the words of a promise keeper.
What Heaven Actually Is
The Apostle John was given a vision of Heaven so overwhelming he struggled to find language for it. In Revelation 21, he described a city of breathtaking scale and beauty, filled with the glory of God, where there is no more death, no more sorrow, no more crying, and no more pain. He wrote that God Himself will wipe every tear from the eyes of His people. Every tear. Not some. Every single one.
Paul, who was himself caught up to the third Heaven and heard things he could not even put into words (2 Corinthians 12:2-4), came back from that experience and wrote: "For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us" (Romans 8:18). This is a man who had been beaten, shipwrecked, imprisoned and left for dead. And he said none of it compares.
Two Witnesses Who Saw It
Don Piper was a Baptist pastor who was killed instantly in a road accident in Texas in 1989, crushed by a lorry. He was certified dead at the scene. For ninety minutes, while a fellow minister prayed over his broken body, Don Piper was somewhere else entirely. He describes arriving at a place of extraordinary light, met by people he had loved and lost, surrounded by music layered and rich beyond anything he had heard on earth. When he was miraculously brought back, re-entering his shattered body was the hardest thing he ever experienced. In his own words, he had been home. He documented this in his book 90 Minutes in Heaven, which has since helped millions of grieving and dying people understand that what waits on the other side of this life is not emptiness but fullness beyond description.
Colton Burpo was four years old when he nearly died during emergency surgery in 2003. Over the months that followed, he began describing things he could not possibly have known. He spoke of a miscarried sister his parents had never told him about. He described his great-grandfather in accurate detail from photographs he had never seen. He spoke of Jesus with a personal familiarity that stopped his father, a pastor, in his tracks. He described colours, people, and a sense of love so overwhelming that no ordinary explanation could account for it. His father Todd Burpo recorded these accounts in Heaven Is for Real, a book that became one of the most widely read testimonies of our generation. What is striking is not the extraordinary nature of the details but how consistently they align with what Scripture already tells us.
These are not the testimonies of excitable people looking for attention. They are sober, reluctant witnesses who found themselves unable to stay silent about what they encountered.
Heaven is not distant, symbolic, or abstract, it is the truest home your soul was made for. Jesus did not speak of it to inspire imagination but to awaken certainty. If He has prepared a place, then your life has a destination. And if your life has a destination, then every choice, every surrender, every step toward Him matters more than you realise.
Let the reality of Heaven steady your priorities. Let it loosen your grip on what fades. Let it sharpen your longing for what lasts. Missing Heaven is missing the very life God intended for you but the door stands open, held by the hands of the One who loves you most.